Alpine Guide

The bargain is written into the exit clause. Putting a Mountain onto the battlefield tapped for three mana is a rate the game has offered for years, but almost always with the cost billed up front; this one hides the invoice at the far end of the creature's life. You get the land, the tempo, and the 3/3 immediately, and you pay only when the creature leaves the battlefield by sacrificing a Mountain (any Mountain, not necessarily the one it fetched). That turns the ramp into a loan rather than a gift. The compulsory-attack line is what makes the loan dangerous: a 3/3 that must attack each combat cannot be tucked away on defense to defer the bill, so the body walks into removal and blocks on the opponent's schedule, and every route to its death hands back the Mountain it lent you. The real wrinkle is that the leave-the-battlefield trigger fires on any zone change and does not discriminate by exit. Blink or bounce it and a fresh Mountain returns on the way back in, but the departure still demands its sacrifice, so a clean flicker nets exactly zero net lands: the play is not dodging the tax, it is timing it, converting a body you were going to lose anyway into a scrap of value by choosing the moment to cash out. The snow typing is not decoration; it feeds snow-matters payoffs that make the fetched land worth more than a red source.